The user experience of enterprise technology

By Rob Gillham
25 Feb 2014

Most big businesses globally are locked into some kind of reliance on enterprise technology. Unfortunately such systems are not only fiendishly difficult to install and maintain, but often equally challenging for the workforce to use. When the stakes are so high, why is the user experience of enterprise systems so bad?

Enterprise systems tend to be large scale business software products, which allow employees in an organisation to share information and to generally make sense of the complex data sets that large businesses tend to produce.

In order to do so, an enterprise product must be installed, configured, and where necessary, customised to meet the needs of the organisation. Such is the complexity involved in simply turning on the likes of Oracle, SAP and many Microsoft products that an entire industry of systems ‘integrators’ exists just to support businesses in this task.

The problem from a user experience perspective is that enterprise systems are generally procured and implemented with the focus purely on solving problems for the business with little attention paid to who the users are and how they want to work.

Many of these systems are remarkable products in terms of their power and capabilities. When businesses buy them, they are effectively buying the promise of order and simplicity being brought to sizeable and complicated business problems. Unfortunately, once installed and configured, many systems merely reflect the organisation’s complexity and reveal this to the user in their design.

Although one increasingly hears the language of UX used by IT vendors, it is quite clear that for many such outfits, ‘user experience’ equates to little more than ‘user interface design’. This demonstrates a very low level understanding of the role UX should play in providing upfront user insight and driving the design of systems.

The result of this lack of user-awareness is that enterprise IT vendors and their business customers often build unfounded assumptions about users into the system – which in turn can lead to a deeply flawed user experience. The consequences of being wrong on this kind of scale can be highly damaging. Companies can find themselves stuck for years with the legacy of a difficult to use, inefficient system with higher-than-expected ongoing costs for user training and helpdesk support to compensate.

In scenarios like the above, I find that certain myths and fallacies are commonly used as reasons/excuses for a failure to deliver the required user experience. Although not exhaustive, I’ve found the following to be among the most common and harmful:

Myth #1: “Our system is too important/complicated to be user-friendly”

Sadly this view is still quite prevalent in the world of enterprise, where user experience is often mistaken for superficial tweaking and dandifying of the front end.

It’s also patent nonsense: companies like 37signals and Fog Creek have been producing serious, web-based business tools with excellent user experience for several years. If you still believe in this fallacy, I’m assuming you work on an IT helpdesk in an enterprise business. Why? Because only turkeys don’t vote for Christmas. Better user experience leads to fewer tickets being raised, lowered training costs and fewer change requests.

Myth #2: The Myth of Compliance

This is the idea that – despite all available evidence – a business process with user poor compliance rates can be made mandatory by hard-coding it into task flows and screen designs. This ignores the fact that a large organisation, its staff and technology form a complex system which is likely to exhibit unexpected behaviours, or put more simply, people don’t comply with stuff that makes their day more difficult – even at work.

If the system constantly gets in their way, users generally find workarounds in the system, or just ignore it completely. Either way, the system is now as broken as the promise of 100% compliance (I spoke more about the Myth of Compliance in this talk).

It’s a common human fallacy that if we fail to see or take account of information we are somehow losing control. In fact, many studies of decision making support the central idea of Barry Schwartz‘s famous 2003 book The Paradox of Choice. This phrase has been widely bandied around, but very simply, Schwartz argues that too much choice leads to decision paralysis.

The entire history of human factors engineering demonstrates that most really good information is about presenting the clarity that comes from less. People make surprisingly good decisions based on very little information. The trick for designers is to ensure that the little they do have is the right information.

What of the cost to businesses then? Well, quite aside from the huge cost of procuring and integrating an enterprise system, once plumbed in these technologies quite literally become part of the DNA of an organisation.

I’m not pretending for an instant that designing good user experience for complex organisations is easy, or even cheap. However the required investment in user-centred design is likely to be a fraction of the overall cost of implementing a system. Given that the alternative can mean years of institutional inefficiencies, upfront investment in user experience doesn’t seem such a bad idea, now does it?

I do have some constructive things to share about enterprise UX, and will do so in a follow up blog shortly.

What do you think?

I was recently working on a transformation project where one of the names mentioned in the article had been implemented across the organisation. The system can be customised in profiles so that if I work in sales I only see the relevant screens, in support I see the ticketing screens etc. This had not been done and as a result everyone saw everything.
When I asked why this was not done I was told it was a requirement but it had been given a very low priority so maybe implemented sometime in the future. I was dumbfounded and apparently the only person there who thought this was insane. When I pointed out how long it took for one person to hunt through all the available screens and tabs EVERYTIME they used it, then multiplied that by how many people in the org there were, understandably, gasps.
What amazed me is that a lot of people had complained about this but over time they had been told 'they would get used to it' so many times they started to 'put up with it'.

Nicely stated, although the question of "Whose experience is it anyhow?" comes to mind. The purchaser? The system integrator? The installer? The person who actually uses the access portal or product? The help desk person? Of course, the correct answer is all (and others as well)...but how would Oracle, SAP and many Microsoft answer that question?
I look forward to the follow up blog...

Totally agree.
Probably the biggest arena to be addressed in UX going forward
We are all too familiar with the "web/marketing/mobile app techniques" of software design but the interfaces we use to do our jobs day in and out - or even worse the ones we use infrequently - that cost businesses fortunes to implement without consideration of purpose or cost of use, who throw "training" at teaching staff 'what to click and when' that is forgotten the moment one leaves the training room.
Other myths to be busted are:
Client Customization - "we can't change our front end to suite just you (client #1 as this would entail changing it for all our clients)".
Back-end integration is too complex (we have API's to your other enterprise systems that prevent interface design).
Business Value mis-understanding (Take an industry standard metric such as Average Handling Time of a customer sales call... is the length of the call driven by the software used by the the sales agent? Can a scroll be reduced by 5 seconds? x number of calls per day x number of sales agents? It sure builds up.
Nice article and I hope I have added more.

Great article Rob. I wrote on this topic for UX Magazine a few years back
http://www.usabilityprofessionals.org/uxmagazine/erp_software_revisited/
The key is helping all the stakeholders realize the cost of a poor UX. I love your analogy about turkeys voting for Christmas.

Thanks everyone for the great feedback on this post.
@Lindsey - yes great point re customisation, I'm planning to write something about this next time
@JohnInnes - thanks for the article URL, good read. Not sure Common Industry Format (CIF) is the silver bullet ERP so badly needs, but I think we are still in broad agreement here.

" ...web-based business tools with excellent user experience... " Web based tools typically have terrible user experiences - hence the rise of "apps", which frequently do the same job as web sites but in a far more user freindly and responsive fashion with device consistent interface elements built into the app (rather than generic interface elements needing to be repeatedly reloaded on every page refresh) and greater scope for off-line working - increasingly critical as 'mobile' becomes ever more prevalent.
Take a product like SharePoint - even with all the ActiveX components (which make compatibility a nightmare across different browsers and versions) it is still awful compared to the responsiveness of a native application.
Web really is not the answer due to compatibility issues (very hard to guarantee the experience across platforms) and poor responsiveness compared with applications that separate interface elements from data and thus only need to load the later.
By way of example, I'm on IE8 and the labels for Comment, Name and Email on this very page do not appear until I press Send Comment. Further, the comments displayed take up approximately 25% of the width on my monitor and are very uncomfortable to read.
By all means have a web version of applications for when a user can't get access to a native application, but it will always be a poor reliation in terms of user experience to a *good* native application and it absolutely doesn't require less support for enterprises (how many enterprises are stuck on IE6 due to web applications that won't run on anything else?).
"The trick for designers is to ensure that the little they do have is the right information." And by the designer deciding what is the right information you are already directing the final decision by excluding possibly pertinent data that doesn't fit your assumptions of how/why decision makers will use the data. Sure, giving managers one choice instead of two makes their lives easier, but is it actually the right approach?